More political energy has been spent on public restrooms than on almost any other piece of this debate, which is strange, because the incident data on bathrooms is some of the clearest in the whole fight. Here is what the evidence actually shows, and where the real, harder questions live instead.
The core claim behind bathroom restriction laws is that letting transgender people use the facility matching their gender identity puts women and children at risk. That claim has been tested directly, more than once, and it keeps coming up empty. A Williams Institute analysis comparing communities with and without transgender-inclusive public accommodation laws found no increase in bathroom-related safety or privacy incidents after those laws took effect.1 More than 300 sexual assault and domestic violence organizations, the practitioners who actually work with survivors, have publicly opposed bathroom bans on the same grounds.
The people facing the most consistently documented risk in this fight aren't cisgender women. Surveys of transgender adults find that a majority avoid public restrooms altogether at some point out of safety concerns, and a meaningful share report having gone without food or water to avoid needing one. When bathroom restrictions are enforced, they don't reliably catch transgender people at all; they catch cisgender women who read as insufficiently feminine to a stranger, including butch women, women with certain medical conditions, and disproportionately, women of color.
Discomfort with sharing an intimate space is a real, human feeling. It isn't evidence of danger, and treating it as evidence produces policy that hurts the wrong people.
Every bathroom restriction requires enforcement, and enforcement means a stranger deciding, on sight, whether another person looks like they belong. That system fails in predictable directions. It has flagged cisgender women as men, and in high-profile cases it has led legislators themselves to publicly misidentify a cisgender colleague. Tip lines set up to report suspected violations have overwhelmingly produced false or unusable reports rather than credible ones.
Meanwhile, the conduct people are actually worried about, voyeurism, assault, harassment, indecent exposure, is already illegal everywhere, regardless of how someone entered a space or what identity they claim. A bathroom bill adds no new tool against an actual predator. What it adds is a daily risk calculation for every transgender person who needs to use a public restroom, and a new tool for harassing anyone who doesn't look "feminine enough" to a stranger with a grievance.
Bathrooms, where stalls provide privacy, are the simpler case. Locker rooms and other fully exposed shared spaces raise a real and separate question that deserves its own answer rather than getting folded into the bathroom fight. Privacy in intimate spaces is a legitimate interest for everyone in the room, transgender people included, and the most durable fix is architectural: private changing stalls, curtained areas, and single-occupancy options that give everyone privacy without singling anyone out. Gyms and schools that have invested in that kind of facility design report higher satisfaction across the board, not just among transgender members.
There is no federal law that broadly bars discrimination in public accommodations based on gender identity; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 covers race, color, religion, and national origin, not gender identity. Roughly twenty states and Washington, D.C. have filled that gap with their own protections. Where they haven't, the outcome depends heavily on which state a person is standing in and which court has most recently ruled.
Employment discrimination is a different, more settled story. In Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), the Supreme Court held 6–3 that Title VII's ban on sex discrimination protects transgender and gay employees from being fired for who they are.2 That precedent still stands, even as enforcement priorities and its application to other statutes, including Title IX, continue to shift with each administration.
The law that would actually stop a predator already exists. Bathroom bills aren't adding a protection. They're relocating a burden onto the people least equipped to carry it.
The book goes further, into shelters, prisons, and the cases that don't fit a slogan on either side.